MoMA, Centre Pompidou and M+ to Treat Holdings as One Collection

By Daniel Okafor

On Friday morning in Hong Kong, M+, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou announced a cultural alliance unprecedented in scale. Its core: the three museums will treat their respective holdings as one shared collection, curated by staff spread across three continents.

The combined holdings run to hundreds of thousands of objects. Add roughly 10 million annual in-person visitors and 125 million online visitors, and you have the largest de facto museum audience on record.

"If we succeed," Pompidou president Laurent Le Bon told ARTnews in Paris, "we will be more than the sum of our parts, and I think that is something quite new." He spoke in a joint interview with M+ director Suhanya Raffel and MoMA director Christophe Cherix.

M+, founded six years ago, holds around 8,000 objects, including the definitive collection of contemporary Chinese art, much of it donated by Swiss businessman and former diplomat Uli Sigg. The Pompidou, whose holdings belong to the French state, is Europe's largest modern art museum. It is currently closed for a five-year restoration and reopens in 2030.

What happens first?

The scheme starts with loans, not mergers:

• From late 2027, major works from M+'s collection will sit on long-term loan in MoMA's collection galleries.
• In 2028, a long-term Centre Pompidou gallery opens at MoMA.
• Parallel plans are in development at the other two museums.

Over the next five years the partners will also co-organize an exhibition on "the contemporary," drawn from all three collections and shown at all three institutions. Pompidou and M+ curators will join MoMA's C-MAP (Contemporary and Modern Art Perspectives), a research program founded in 2009 to study art histories outside North America and Western Europe.

A joint steering committee of the three directors plus department heads and curators will meet monthly, with one major in-person meeting a year. The first takes place next month at MoMA; later meetings rotate among the three museums.

Where did the alliance come from?

Bilateral deals, mostly. In February 2025, M+ and MoMA signed a memorandum of understanding covering collection sharing, joint research and curatorial exchanges. Earlier this year, M+ and the Pompidou announced their own multiyear partnership, which includes reopening the renovated Pompidou with a two-museum exhibition that later travels to M+.

The directors also cited deeper commonalities: cross-disciplinary collecting, a focus on the art of the present, and a shared lineage running from MoMA's founding in 1929 through the Pompidou's opening in 1977 to M+'s in 2021. Raffel acknowledged the Pompidou was "one of the key institutions" that M+ "looked to that helped us guide the principles around building an institution like this for Asia."

"We each have things that are absolutely unique in the world," Cherix said. "Our first role is of course preservation. But how can we make those collections work harder for us and touch people well beyond the walls of our institutions?"

How is this different from old-fashioned loans?

Cherix drew the line himself. Traveling exhibitions and project-based collaborations come and go; this is a long-term commitment to building programs from the ground up, "bringing our teams much closer together."

The arrangement also targets economies of scale and sustainability. Raffel and Cherix noted that sending parts of M+'s contemporary Chinese art to MoMA for extended periods would let the works rotate through MoMA's galleries and reach other American museums more cheaply.

It changes acquisitions too. "We can't just keep collecting, so we are sharing instead," Raffel said. To enter the shared collection, Cherix said, a work will "need to have no equal" in any of the three holdings.

"Even if we want to be devoted to the art of our time, we become a historical collection," Cherix added. "How can we reset that? I think this alliance gives us exactly the capacity to have a different scope, and a forward-looking vision."

Raffel called it six years ago, in an interview with András Szántó for the book The Future of the Museum: museums will "stand together and work to help one another to deliver a more sustainable baseline." Collaboration, she said, "will be a key aspect of the next chapter of museum work." Prophecy, it turns out, has a press office.

Is this really new?

Not entirely. Museums have pooled resources for two decades. Since 2003, when the Whitney, Tate and the Pompidou jointly bought Bill Viola's Five Angels for the Millennium, joint acquisitions have become routine.

In 2018, collector Budi Tek partnered with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to share collections with Shanghai's Yuz Museum, which he founded; a new foundation oversaw a collection living in China and traveling between Shanghai and Los Angeles. LACMA works went to the Yuz in 2009 for "In Production: Art and the Studio System"; in 2021, 20 pieces from Tek's collection showed at LACMA in "Legacies of Exchange." China rejected attempts to make the Yuz public; Tek died in 2022.

In 2022, around 100 works from Greek industrialist Dimitri Daskalopoulos went as a shared gift to the Guggenheim and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. In 2024, the Hammer, LACMA and MOCA jointly received some 350 works from Jarl and Pamela Mohn, a pool they keep growing as the Mohn Art Collective (MAC3).

Those deals shared donors or single collections. The MoMA–Pompidou–M+ pact shares something larger: the museums themselves. If the monthly committee meetings hold, the next benchmark arrives in late 2027, when Hong Kong's Sigg-schooled holdings move into MoMA's galleries.